Les Arts Florissants, Barbican, London, review: A brilliant evening

William Christie and his Paris-based ensemble Les Arts Florissants performed pieces from Monteverdi's final work

William Christie and his ensemble Les Arts Florissants performed Monteverdi at the Barbican

We’ve had loads of Monteverdi during his centenary year, but for those who can never get too much of his music, William Christie and his Paris-based ensemble Les Arts Florissants provided a brilliant evening. Their programme consisted of pieces drawn from his final work, Selva morale e spirituale, which translates as ‘Moral and spiritual forest’, that being a very suitable title for this capacious anthology of hymns, psalms, motets, sacred madrigals, and solo songs.

Composed while Monteverdi was choirmaster at St Mark’s in Venice, these works are astonishingly varied and reflect his supreme artistry in both luxuriously-extended and fiercely-condensed forms. His full-dress Gloria is an example of the former; his two-minute madrigal E questa vita un lampo – ‘This life is a flash of lightning’ – is a perfect example of the latter, expressing huge philosophical ideas in a nutshell: its first two lines go like the wind, then it broadens out in an expansive largo, before expiring in an explosion of busy counterpoint.

With eight singers, seven instrumentalists, and himself swivelling on his stool to accompany on both organ and harpsichord, Christie presented this refined amalgam of music and poetry in all its sophisticated emotional ambivalence. ‘Today we laugh and tomorrow we shall weep’ – with its images of beauty, decay, and corruption – was sung with alternating levity and sobriety; as Alexandra Coghlan observed in her elegant programme essay, in this music ‘certainty almost always turns to doubt’. Arianna’s lament in its solo Madonna form moved between frantic desperation and despairing resignation in soprano Lucia Martin-Carton’s performance; Monteverdi’s instruction ‘recitar cantando’ – ‘speak through singing’ – was faithfully followed in soprano Emmanuelle de Negri’s delivery of the ‘Confitebor terzo’. The male singers achieved their rapid ornamented runs with a relaxed accuracy devoid of any preciousness. In technical terms, this was a very classy act.